Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times
Do anti-subsidy advocates count as experts? Since subsidies are a hotly debated subject, it seems the article is confounding a debate winner with an expert. The gist is that fertilizer subsidies (vital to American farming) have been discouraged in Africa under an ideal of free trade and privatization, arguably exacerbating famine risk as indicated by the huge success of Malawi when they decided to embrace subsidies last year.
The “experts” in the title simply represent a journalistic attempt at adding excitement to a tired old storyline. There is no evidence in the article that the issue was anything but a political problem. Those advocates may have been experts on free trade, but they were not experts on farming, fertilizers, or famine prevention. If there was debate, the winner was not decided by any neutral third party.
As much as I would like an article that illustrated a big gaff from the experts, this is not one of them. It raises a question however; how much of the social construction of expertise turns on the same political process?
